St Arilda's bluebells and cowslips

It being my mother's birthday yesterday I turned down the opportunity of a jaunt to Wells in the now fully functioning Moggy with Dru Marland and John Terry, instead partaking of a carvery with my parents and my aunt in a pub on the A38 just outside Thornbury.  As I was fetching them their 'bottomless Cornish ice-cream' (sub Mr Whippy in a small glass sundae dish, self-served from a machine that oozed it out in a way that reminded me of my dog's rear end), I decided to wrest the remains of the afternoon from the jaws of defeat and take them somewhere worth going, namely, St Arilda's at Oldbury-on-Severn, which is perched high on an ancient man-made tump overlooking the flood plain of the River Severn. 

Possibly not the most tactful of places to take a captive audience whose combined age is 252, but none of them had ever been there before.  But the views are splendid.

This being later than last year's visit, the daffodils were mostly over, but there were bluebells, cowslips, dandelions, primroses, herb robert and starry stitchwort, not to mention hedgerows crammed with blackthorn. 

Here's my mother at 84, still blazing a trail. 

  

And yes, she still has enough puff to blow out all the candles in one go.